Wednesday 18 August 2010 16.16 EDT
First published on Wednesday 18 August 2010 16.16 EDT

If Rafa Nadal had a serve with more bite on the hard courts – and he is working on it – he would be heading to Flushing Meadows in a couple of weeks with the US Open more of a potential hit than a hope. As it is, it is the bauble that might elude him, the hardest of courts in every way.

Instead of being the threat his talent demands, the world No1 remains vulnerable on the surface to competent counter-punchers. Not against such players as Taylor Dent, though, in his opening match of the Cincinnati Masters in Mason, Ohio, where he won handily enough – 6-2, 7-5 in an hour and 24 minutes with only a brief scare in the second.

Novak Djokovic, no great belter of the ball-in-hand himself, says you have to be a power hitter to have realistic expectations of winning in New York, adding the caveat: "Unless you're Nadal."

Moments after beating his tough-serving compatriot, Viktor Troicki, Djokovic said: "If you are very fit, maybe [you can]. You need to have a decent serve, which is going to give you some free points, and, especially on a court like this, which is quite a bit faster than the one we played on last week [in Toronto]."

Djokovic, seeded two here, concedes his own serve has been unreliable and is at a loss to explain why. "It's hard to say," he said. "It gets up and down. It's not what I want, but I'm slowly getting the old serve I had. I had a good motion and, when I won a grand slam, I was serving really well, around 200km per hour on average, which was great, and with a lot of precision. These days I'm struggling a bit, but it's a mental thing. It's going to get to me sooner or later."

Djokovic, notoriously, has a few more demons in the cupboard than Nadal. Nevertheless, Nadal-Dent turned out to be a limp exchange of tennis pleasantries, a match decided by the American's inadequacies rather than the Spaniard's strengths.

If Rafa had been Roger Federer, he would not have bothered to sweat. Instead, as always, he put every sinew and muscle into every shot and chase. There, surely, is no more physical player in the game, a muscled ball of energy and intensity whose steel-wristed forehand is the tennis equivalent of Sonny Liston's left hook.

And that only adds to the mystery of his sub-terrific serve at the highest level. The prevailing theory is that as a natural right-hander who became a Lefty, Nadal has somehow messed up his biomechanics.

Yet, he could look across the net at Dent and see an athlete of lesser natural talent but with the ability to blast opponents away with a single shot. Dent hit seven aces; Nadal hit none – but Rafa got 70 per cent of his first serves in, and that is the key to his compromise: accuracy and pressure.

Sadly for him, Dent did not look in prime shape, and moved with all the delicacy of a bouncer at times, his rounded shoulders seeming to make him top-heavy on a day of heat and humidity. He did well to beat Feliciano López, 6-3, 6-2 in the first round, but lumbered today.

Dent, it should be remembered, spent nearly a year laid out with a back injury. He returned at last year's US Open with the most emotional and dramatic of first-round wins, grabbing the umpire's microphone after five tense sets to acknowledge the hysterical acclaim of the crowd.

His error count in the first set here was wretched, though. With Andy Roddick dropping out of the top 10 in Canada last week, there is now no American on that merit board for the first time since rankings began in 1973. They need something to cheer about. Today there were only a few such opportunities.

Dent banged down a serve at 139 miles an hour, the quickest of the week, to hold a 5-2 lead in the second set as his muscularity gave him some hope, but he faded at the end – and Nadal celebrated as if he had taken the title.